Not everybody took Brin seriously at the time, and not only because he was going through a phase of wearing the peculiar Google Glass headset at every public appearance. Google had been testing driverless cars for just three years, and few knew how much progress the company was making.

But it turns out that Brin’s prediction was only off by a year. Last week Waymo, a subsidiary of the search company’s Alphabet parent that was spun off from Google two years ago, launched a commercial driverless taxi service to the public.